The current development of information technology is characterized by an abundance of information systems of different kinds providing various services to customers. Regardless of whether these systems are public, or available in a private environment, system integration is a crucial demand in the software and hardware industry. It is common for an enterprise to have more than a few computer systems from different vendors, working simultaneously to achieve a common goal. Typically, the data produced by one information system is required by another system to automate a business process in an enterprise. System integration means that the different information systems communicate efficiently with each other and exchange information for accomplishment of the common goal.
Different information systems generate and store data in different formats and quantities. Software and hardware developers implement various methods to enable smooth and efficient communication between the separate systems. The communication between two information systems could be defined as data exchange based on predefined syntax rules. The rules are necessary to guarantee that the systems understand each other. The structure of the exchanged data is predefined in both systems by the rules, e.g., data fields, data types, parameters and variables, special characters, etc. The predefined syntax rules present a flexibility and universality threshold before the system integration. This threshold corresponds to the amount of resources necessary to establish a communication between two information systems based on common syntax rules.